random selection

सपने सुनने वाला
तारा दिन में
सो जाता है
तभी दिन का
सपना कभी सच
नहीं हो पाता है
दिन के सपने
आँखों में छुपाके
रात सो जाओ
फिर तारा जागकर
सपने सुन कर
उनपे खूब सोचेगा
फिर कुछ सपने
आँखों से चुराके
सच कर देगा

happy to help :)

i am superman and i can fly
but there are not many who know
you're the one who gives me wings
those and all my sweet little things

dreams just seem to roll on and on
all the time i'm holding your hand
i have my doubts every other day
all those dreams are colored your way

and when i wake up in the mornings
i'm just happy that there's another day
there's some sunshine at my door
and i can look at you some more

Everyday I want to fly, stay by my side
Everyday I want to dream, stay by my side
Every morning I wish I could just play
Wish the mornings would just stay…..

[the last para is the background song of the vodafone 'happy to help' ad.]

love aaj kal

socha na tha, jab we met and now love aaj kal. i think i've taken a liking to imtiaz ali's movies :P!

on another note, i think it's good that deepika padukone has been given very few dialogues in this movie. any more, and i'm sure the result would have drastically different :P! the tall lass looked out of her depth when pitted against the suave and witty saif. i really think kareena would have done a much better job. though there was a time when the only movie in which i thought kareena had a done good job was chameli. but jab we met changed that. that's what good directors can do to you.

waise, what's all this with a foreigner doing the role of harleen? couldn't they have found an indian punjabi kudi ? :D

flat world

when my parents came to know i had bought a 150 cc bike, they asked me why i had bought so heavy a bike (its weight also comes to around 150 kg). and i had replied: it's not as if i have to carry it. the bike will carry me [not my words. someone else had said this to me]

today i realised how it feels to pull/push/cajole a 150 kg mini-elephant - even though i had to do this only for about half a km. my day started with a flat tire. and when i finally managed to get to the puncture repairing shop, it turned out there was no puncture! the guy said that most probably someone had played a prank.

now, even after being drenched in sweat, i believe in the basic humanity of people. i still think this has something to do with yesterday evening when i had air filled at the petrol pump.

however, if i'm proved wrong at a later stage, i swear the culprit will be bludgeoned to death. with a 150 kg object.

the dead/dying leaf

MORBID

i feel cold
it's not the watery expanse
that holds me tight
it isn't even the breeze
that chills the spine

i remember being warm
not too long ago
warm and cozy and cared for
and then, all of a sudden
i was pushed away
left to the winds
discarded.

and now i feel cold
the cold of the distance
from the hand that healed me
the cold of the death inside
of all that i had held dear

and now i die here
in a pool of my own tears

CONTENT

the memories remain
of my green days
when i used to sway
to the singing winds
and my tree hugged me
and held me tight
when the song rose
and became a din

now i'm old
too weak to hold on
my tree had to let me go
but it laid me to sleep
here on this stream

i can still see
all my childhood places
and as i am
lulled to sleep
by the ripples
the singing winds make
i can see
my tree crying
it's a rain i'm happy
to drown in

[image rights rest with basu. i was told some circular polarizer was used to take this pic. what that means, i have no idea :P]

no room for mush

बिल के बाहर झाँक
सोच रहा बेचारा सांप
ऊपर जो ये छतरी लाल है
क्या ये मेरा काल है
या फ़िर है दोस्त रंगीला
कोई साथी छैल छबीला?
ऑंखें फाड़, पूरा लीन
कर रहा अच्छे से छान बीन

image drawn by Crazy. she claims it's a frog. i, however, differ.

needle in a haystack

i tried out wolframalpha today. went there from a slashdot article. the article talked about how, for the first time, some software is claiming copyright on its output. anyway, the search engine or 'the computational knowledge engine' as its creators call it, produces some truly amazing results. while there are already lots of semantic search engines on the net, the little that i dribbled with wolframalpha, made me like the way its results are displayed and also the depth of information provided. i don't know whether there is a law dictating that depth and breadth of information are inversely proportional but it's true that this engine will not turn out results for many queries. so, for example, red hot chilli peppers will give you nutritional information of chillies and peppers. but try searching for an english word or 'who killed kennedy' or 'india' or some stock and the differences will stand out.

however, i'm not sure how all this 'making sense' of queries will make things better. true, it brings you relevant data quicker and in a more compact form - data for which you might have had to visit 2-3 pages. but the presence of information repositories like wikipedia means that, in most cases, if your query makes some sense, you'll get all the required info from wikipedia and links to more information sources. but most of the searches that people do are for queries that don't exactly 'make sense' in the first attempt - these are the queries that matter because information on others is amply available. try searching for 'rural income trends in india' and i'm sure it will be a google or yahoo that will give you your desired result.

however, semantic search is touted to be the next big thing in search. and i suppose i'm not aware of all the uses it can be put to. let's see..

yesterday vs today

What do you make of old timers, including a few composers, who denounce today's music?

I ask how can you ignore the wide variety of music you hear today? How can you not enjoy the work of some of our finest composers whose music may last for decades? Of course there is a lot of bad music but there was bad music in the past too. I do not believe that just because someone is 80, the person is full of wisdom. Sometimes a 10-year-old person can have more wisdom than a person in the 70s or 80s.

-kailash kher in an interview with rediff.

and i couldn't agree more :)

आ बैल मुझे मार

तारों की दोस्ती मुझे
महँगी पड़ गई
एक नई भारी मुसीबत
मेरे गले पड़ गई
दिन का थका इंसान
रात सो नही पाता है
लाखों तारों कि बातों का
इतना शोर जो होता है

चहास

खुशियाँ तो आती हैं
पर तेरी याद लाती हैं
तुम संग ना बाँट पाऊँ तो
हंसी भी कहाँ भाती है

डबडबायी आँखों से
सूनापन निहारते हैं हम
सब कुछ रहने पर भी
कुछ कहीं लगता है कम

कब से इस इंतज़ार में
कि फिर कब आओगे तुम
बैठे हैं हम यहाँ
खोये खोये गुमसुम

फोन की बातों में
आँखें कहाँ देख पाते हैं
खुश हो हंसो तुम जब
हंसी कहाँ देख पाते हैं

महीना हो चला है
अब दूरी भारी लगती है
तुम्हारी बातों की मिठास बिना
चाय भी फीकी लगती है

बहुत बातें कहनी है
चलो कहीं मिल आयें
चाय कि चुस्कियों पे
कुछ लम्हे काट आयें

कि इन प्यारे लम्हों के
मोती बहुत बटोरे हैं
पर मन कहाँ भरता है
ऐसी चाय के हम चटोरे हैं

[image copyright rests with Crazy. used here without permission :D. this sister tends to give me lots of 'fodder' for thought :P. this poem is for two of my favorite people, the ones explicitly/implicitly mentioned in the pic :)]